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An anonymous reader writes "Google just settled video codec patent claims with MPEG LA and its VP8 format, which it wants to be elevated to an Internet standard, already faces the next round of patent infringement allegations. Nokia submitted an IPR declaration to the Internet Engineering Task Force listing 64 issued patents and 22 pending patent applications it believes are essential to VP8. To add insult to injury, Nokia's declaration to the IETF says NO to royalty-free licensing and also NO to FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) licensing. Nokia reserves the right to sue over VP8 and to seek sales bans without necessarily negotiating a license deal. Two of the 86 declared IPRs are already being asserted in Mannheim, Germany, where Nokia is suing HTC in numerous patent infringement cases. A first VP8-related trial took place on March 8 and the next one is scheduled for June 14. In related Nokia-Google patent news, the Finns are trying to obtain a U.S. import ban against HTC to force it to disable tethering (or, more likely, to pay up)."

The winning strategy has never been to list the patents up front. As long as they do that, people will now go about invalidating them. VP8 was already designed to work around patent restricions - one of the few software projects to take that strategy.

Well, the FUD strategy has been to never list the patents. If you actually do have patents there is no good reason not to list them. One of the big problems with software patents is exactly that they can be so broad that working around them is actually impossible.

Ozmanjusri, you're in serious danger of earning the coveted "+5 Troll"/. achievement. This is a Holy Grail I have aspired to for 10 years and more. I certainly hope some few folks with mod points give you "underrated" to put it over for you.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what MPEG LA is and isn't. They're a patent pool. They don't own any patents themselves, they just make it simple to license out a large basket of many (but not all) H.264 patents (one of the conditions is that you also put your own H.264 patents into the pool). You could go out and negotiate patent licenses from the original holders if so inclined.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think I am "anyone who follows codecs" and I'm not as sure of this as you are.

A lot of patents are very narrow. Many of the famous software patents, like One-Click, are disturbingly broad, but many of the patents related to video compression are narrow. The VP8 strategy, as I understand it, was to study the patents and make sure that everything in VP8 was just different enough that it doesn't infringe.

This means that VP8 is an inferior codec compared to H.264; some of the patented techniques really are better. However, it should be a "good enough" codec for most purposes.

Their "work around" was to give identical technologies different names and put their fingers into their ears screaming "LA LA LA LA LA" denying any patent infringement.

-1, flamebait.

When they realized this wasn't going to work, Google finally licensed the patents from MPEG LA.

I don't purport to have a secret pipeline into Google management and be able to tell what they were thinking. Do you have such a secret pipeline?

An equally workable summary is: Google had an opportunity to throw a few dollars at MPEG-LA and end the FUD forever, and they did so. Even if Google was convinced they could win on the merits in court, it was worth something to just make the problems vanish.

Note that Google specifically has not agreed that there was any patent infringement:

"This agreement is not an acknowledgment that the licensed techniques read on VP8. The purpose of this agreement is meant to provide further and stronger reassurance to implementors of VP8," said Google executive Serge Lachapelle in a post on a forum.

P.S. I am somewhat bemused by your tone. It seems you are eager to see VP8 get shackled by patents... why is that? Are you so certain that Google is a bad actor here that you just want to see Google get punished? Or do you hate freedom, or what exactly?

Please for one moment stipulate that VP8 contains technologies that are just enough different from the patents that they don't infringe... would you still have a problem with VP8 in that case?

MPEG-LA has claimed that it is impossible to make a video codec without infringing patents, because all the fundamental technologies are patented... is this, in your opinion, a good situation?

I'm personally cheering for Google in all this. They spent over $100 million to buy On2, just so they could set VP8 free. As far as I can tell, they did this for two reasons:

So they could ensure that their costs would not skyrocket on YouTube. They weren't looking forward to choosing between paying possibly-ruinous patent royalties, or using lame video codecs and burning far too much bandwidth.

To help keep us all a bit more free. Lots of the people who work at Google are geeks like us and value freedom as we do.

Just another example of why Slashdot needs to get rid of ACs, if they don't have the balls to stand by their comments they should probably STFU.

And I'm sorry to the Google fanbois but anybody who had taken more than a minute to glance at the MPEG patents could have told you this, short of inventing an entire new way to encode and decode video you are royally fucked because those MPEG patents cover pretty much every way we know to encode and stream video, as much as I think they are a douchebag company MPEG-

Consider that you need a court case to work out if you do in fact infringe on a patent and in video codecs with the likes of the MPEG-LA there are sometime like almost 1000 of them or more. Getting just a summary/option thing from a patent attorney is about 10k last we checked and its non binding. That is a lot of cash.

Also some of these patents are probably too broad and would be invalidated. But its a lot of em and a lot of time money to do so.

That is why I have said that any innovation in this area will come from Asia, because the USA has become such a minefield you can't get anything done. Ironically that is exactly how the USA got a leg up on the old world in the industrial revolution, we ignored their patents and our guys could see what worked and what didn't and improve upon it, not anymore.

At least not until you make codec that is radically different. All current codecs are based on the same stuff - some variant of cosine transform, macroblocks, motion vectors. Just small improvements of concepts from MPEG2.

No, VP8 *is* infringing, H.264 "might be". That's a huge difference. Taking on Google over WebM is easy, taking on the MPEG-LA will be a tall order indeed. That's another huge difference.

Seriously, if you're going to use a video coded, you might as well go with the safer bet, especially when that safer bet is superior in quality, directly supported in silicon all over the world, and the dominant format on the Internet.

This is a patent issue, not copyright. They are indebted to their corporate masters, but different ones. The US is still home to many of the tech industry giants (Intel, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc) - and strong patent laws at home and around the world make sure those industry giants stay giant, rather than being displaced by upstarts from competing countries. Similar situation in drug development. It's basic economic protectionism, and every government does it to some extent. It's only common sense to prote

Sad but apparently true. Microsoftie Steven Elop took over the reins at Nokia a couple of years ago, abandoned their Linux plans and other OSs, and declared that the company would stake its future on Windows Phone. Which Nokia now makes, not that it's a big hit. So the struggling company will happily swim in Microsoft's spit as it hopes to rely on them for a lifeline.

It won't work in the long term either. Microsoft has no strategic partners, only strategic victims.

Before you answer too quickly, ponder which ones would continue selling Windows exclusively if there was a viable mainstream alternative? They tolerate the conditions imposed upon them because they feel they must, not because they feel like "partners".

Dell just went private because they have LOST so much share they didn't want to stay public. Looks like it was Mike that was paying back the stockholders,.. Not Steve, ouch.

Lenovo, IBM outsourced PC maker that IBM finally just gave up trying to make money on.

HP has bought Compaq and several other brands trying to stay solvent making PCs and gone through how many CEOs?

Lastly, Samsung and Acer are only on the game because they WERE the CHEAP LABOR 10 years ago, and now as OEMs they had enough parts and/or assembly tied up to bring their own brand when the First String players all went under. They are bodies and screwdrivers, nothing more.

Of this whole list only two companies (HP & Dell) have ever had any input at all into WRITING SOFTWARE that is important enough to Microsoft Windows to make the copyright blurb. The rest of the parties build boxes and put its good enough effort into making the machines boot up properly.. Microsoft or chipmakers do all the rest. Only Dell and HP were ever vaguely "partners" the rest were BENEATH MS customer status a very long time they built boxes.

"What Nokia is doing here is simply the normal course of business if a patent holder (Nokia) does not share the vision of another company (Google) with respect to a proposed standard and reserves all rights. What motivation could Nokia possibly have to donate something to a Google initiative? None. No motivation, no obligation, no license. Simple as that"

quoted from http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/setback-for-googles-vp8-nokia-refuses.html

Well, first, I'd think decades, surely, giving MS ample time to screw around; and second, I meant before the puppet companies go under. Caldera/SCO had lost something like 90% of its stock value a year or two before they started their campaign against Linux.

Exactly. Apple has just sold more iPhones than ever, the iPhone 5 is currently the top selling smart phone, the iPhone 4S is in second place, and the iPhone 4 is in third. Apple has just had their most profitable quarter ever (and the second most profitable quarter of any public company in history).

So, yeah, clearly selling phones hasn't worked out for Apple at all...

Enough of this shit. You want to know what hurts innovation? Shit like this. No one knows what petty (or even not petty) patents they're going to infringe upon if they try to make anything, so they just don't bother.

Nokia has been in phone business and phone related software business since the start. One could argue that they started the business in the first place and would be at least partially right.

They most definitely hold at least some patents that came to be before google was formed. And a whole lot more from time after google was formed but before it purchased android.

The problem is how they are choosing to use them. Normally you'd just negociate a licensing agreement and be done with it. But here, they're actually patent trolling. "We don't share the vision and do not want to help". So we sue to block. Ouch.

That's not the way nokia of old got to be on top. Elop and his microsoftism shines through.

I think at this point, we can all look back on their history and realize that patents suck. Their concept was noble... protect the new inventor from having his invention stolen by a large corporation. But in practice, that happens anyway. Whomever has the most money for lawyers wins. The inventor of something is completely irrelevant at this point. Patents are nothing more than a legal artifice used by corporations to siphon money from one another. So lets just give it up, drop patent law and see how it goes. It can't be any worse than what we have now.

Most of the modern "intellectual property" related legislation sucks at this point for one simple reason: it went from "give creative people more incentive to be creative" to "how can big conglomerates maximize profits by exploiting both authors and consumers as much as possible".

Because authors and artists get screwed under modern legislation almost as badly as consumers do.

This was certainly true for a long part of the Nokia history. But the actual Nokia is something that have lost an extremely large amount of connections with the Nokia "mobile phone world leader" of the past. We are now forced to take notice that the actual Nokia is more and more close to the definition of patent troll. The latest new just confirm this trend.

Methinks both the eric conspiracy and jcdr are correct in their assertions. Nokia of late, under Elop is has both business models in use at the moment: selling phones to the developing world *and* patent trolling.

This btw is the same guy that sold the Nokia headquarters building, while agreeing to lease it back long-term.

He closed several factories in Europe, sending production (and build-quality) to Asia.

He's has and is paid many millions, although he's only been with the company just a few years. Coincidentally he came from Microsoft with millions of MS shares in the bank. He's Ballmer's Tool.

If you listen to a large amount of comments about Nokia this last two years, you will probably notice a dramatic increase of opinions that there is a lot of absurdities in the actual Nokia. The most absurd one is still that Nokia blindly ignore this reality...

The 'evolved' part is sure to matter. There must be a lot of new techniques added. Even if there weren't, I expect many of those patents are of the 'X, but on a mobile device' form. Not the strongest of patents, but throw enough of them into court and a few are going to survive challenge just on luck alone.

Let's see I looked at the one patent filed in my country. Patent filed at 2001, granted in 2011, valid to 2021.

What I hate the most is these hidden patents which are first filed, but they delay it for as long as possible (so they also remain hidden) and 10 years (!) later they get granted and are valid an other 10 years.

VP7 is from 2005, VP6 is from 2003, VP5 is from 2002. All based on TrueMotion S created in 1995 or so.

Wow! Back in 1999 after I purchased my first cellphone, one of the first things I did was to investigate how to connect it to my laptop to give me a mobile modem. Sure enough there was serial cable I could buy for it.

I don't care how early Nokia was to enter the mobile phone market. There is no way they should be able to patent any part this process. I'd rather have no patents at all than grant a 20 year monopoly to some company for tacking "on a mobile device" to some obvious idea like tethering.

We need real patent reform like:* Eliminating Software patents* Fix the "obviousness test" and throw out all the existing ones that fail to meet this standard.* No patents granted to logical evolution of current technology like tethering* Grant a theoretical patent (i.e. where invention has not yet been realized) for no more than 7 years* Allow a patent extension/modification upon successful invention* Mechanical and physics-technology patents should last no more than 15 years

The spec consists largely of C code copy-pasted from the VP8 source code -- up to and including TODOs, âoeoptimizationsâ, and even C-specific hacks, such as workarounds for the undefined behavior of signed right shift on negative numbers. In many places it is simply outright opaque. Copy-pasted C code is not a sp

This isn't going to go well for Nokia. Already no one wants their products and Microsoft has already hinted they'll abandon Windows phone next year. Nokia is now a patent troll with no other business model. Well, it has a business model, but it's so broken it will never recover. Hiring that nitwit Elop. Elost!

I used to have tons of respect for Nokia. Then one of their employees got VLC knocked off the Apple App Store for incredibly selfish reasons (certainly didn't help VLCs market share). Now becoming a patent bully in the footsteps of their OS provider. Not pretty.

It's disgusting they have patents filed in 2001 that are still pending that means they have will have a monopoly on that particular invention until abotu 2030, due to a loophole in the patent law that states that if the patent takes longer than 2 years to grant.. the time until the actual grant date doesn't count. This allows companies to extract royalties for 30 to even 40 years, especially if they had other patents that were granted for a particular type of technology.

Seriously, other than a few models Nokia phones have been patently awful. Every project Noka has bought out has ended up turning to absolute crap. They make awful alliances with awful companies. Now pulling tricks with vague algorithm patents? Fucking die Nokia. On and your boots suck too. Just spare us and give up on everything.

Microsoft. Basically, when Elop took over, Nokia became an MS Vassal. That's when they dumped the world's most popular phone OS and their internal modern OS development projects for Windows Phone, and why Windows Phone ads use Nokia phones. It's basically the same play they ran when they got SGI to start building NT workstations. And, not that far off from the investments in SCO to enable the fight against Linux. Note that the MS Vassal is actively using their patent portfolio specifically to fight one of Google's strategic plays, despite the fact that a phone vendor that has given up on OS development would probably do much better if they added Android to their phone portfolio.

That's when they dumped the world's most popular phone OS and their internal modern OS development projects for Windows Phone

When they dumped Symbian it was the *FORMER* world's most popular phone OS - Android had already dethroned Symbian when Nokia switched to Windows Phone.

No. Android was not even close to Symbian at that time.

As for MeeGo - would it have taken off? Maybe, but probably not. And the hardware it launched with was decidedly not modern at the time, which was perhaps a reason Nokia killed it. If they couldn't keep up with SoC developments, they would never manage to catch up to the competition.

Meego hat much better changes than Windows Phone (which did not take off and still does not sell anywhere close to what Symbian was selling in the pastin a much smaller market.). What ever you are mumbling here about SoC development does not make any sense considering that Linux supports much morehardware than Windows Phone.

You are kidding right? The Maemo / Meego N900 and N97 received great reviews by people who actually used them.

You seem to be confusing N9 with N97; funny, because the latter was perhaps Nokia's lowest fall.Yes, the several hundred thousand Linux enthusiasts gave the devices great reviews. There were not-so-great reviews too, but our memory is selective... Now Lumia phones receive great reviews too.

When they dumped Symbian it was the *FORMER* world's most popular phone OS

That depends on when you count the dumping. Nokia had a problem that they had an OS kernel (EXA2) that was beautifully designed for mobile devices, but had a userland that was somewhat archaic and designed to work around hardware limitations that didn't really exist anymore. Their solution was to throw away the kernel and replace it with Linux. They'd already begun relegating Symbian to the low end before Android was released. They had multiple strategies internally, none of which was working and all of

Second, When MPEG LA first announced the VP8 pool formation, a rush of companies applied to be in the pool, partly because everyone wanted to see what everyone else had. That gave way to some amount of disappointment. And by 'some amount' I mean 'rather a lot really, more than the MPEG-LA would care to admit.'

Eventually, things whittled down to a few holdouts. Those '11 patent holders' do not assert they have patents that cover the spec. They said '_may_ cover'. The press release itself repeats this. Then these patent holders said 'and we're willing to make that vague threat go away for a little cash'. Google paid the cash. This is what lawyers do.

That's why it's a huge newsworthy deal when companies like NewEgg actually take the more expensive out and litigate a patent. It is always more expensive than settling, even if you'd win the case, and very few companies are willing or able to do it. Google was probably able, but not willing.

As for the quality stuff, WebM is close enough that it doesn't matter [compression.ru]. We could argue details of that point, but the real reason Google is doing this is because the use cases for a web-centric codec are VERY different than the use cases for Hollywood and broadcast media. For example, web programmers don't care about encoding speed, we care about battery usage on cell-phones.

VP8 still has room for a lot of improvement at the encoder. It took many years to get x264 to the world-class piece of software it is today, and VP8 has yet to catch up. The standard may be as good at h264 in quality/bitrate potential, but what can really be achieved is limited by the encoder.

If HTC goes Windows they are dead. Today the market for Windows phones is small, the amount of apps low compared to Android and iPhone, so no thanks Windows.

Bullshit: Only Nokia is stupid enough to put all their eggs in one basket say "We only make Windows phones and nothing else and that's smart because we say so.". HTC makes Windows Phones. Samsung makes Windows Phones. But you don't see them because HTC and Samsung also make Android phones and they make a lot more of them and they sell a lot more of them. IF Windows Phone 8 becomes a "hit" / popular then you'll instantly see everyone making Android also becoming Windows Phone makers. If HTC were to be equall